A Trilogy of Hope: My Journey out of the Depths of Teenage Despair

By Celia Perryman

Following on from a childhood where I was loved at home, but didnt fit in at school and never really felt like I belonged anywhere, I became depressed and suicidal at age 12 and spent much of my teenage years medicated and in therapy, questioning the point of my existence and wondering whether the world would be better off without me.
I wrote my first book, Ive Got Something to Say: Alone and Screaming in the Darkness at the age of 16 because, although I didnt exactly have any answers, I wanted to reach out to others so they wouldnt feel so alone. I decided there and then, that if I ever did find any answers then I would write more books. And that is what I have done. I wrote my second book, Maybe We Are All Relevant: At Times I Can See the Light at the age of 20, and the third and final part of this trilogy, And Now I Know Why: A Life of Sunshine, Storms and Rainbows at the age of 32.
I have decided to publish my three books together as A Trilogy of Hope: My Journey Out of the Depths of Teenage Despair, so that I can share my whole journey with you and to give you and others hope in seeing that it really is possible to go from the absolute depths of despair to leading a life in which there is love, light and joy, where I have found some meaning to my existence and all the pain I have been through seems worth it because it has led me to where I am today.
I feel honoured to be sharing my story with you and I hope that my words can be of some comfort to you and bring you hope for a happier future. Things will get better. You are going to be okay. I am thinking of you.
With love,
Celia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496910516

Celia Perryman

Following on from a childhood where I was loved at home, but didn’t fit in at school and never really felt like I belonged anywhere, I became depressed and suicidal at age 12 and spent much of my teenage years medicated and in therapy, questioning the point of my existence and wondering whether the world would be better off without me. I wrote my first book, “I’ve Got Something to Say: Alone and Screaming in the Darkness” at the age of 16 because, although I didn’t exactly have any answers, I wanted to reach out to others so they wouldn’t feel so alone. I decided there and then, that if I ever did find any answers then I would write more books. And that is what I have done. I wrote my second book, “Maybe We Are All Relevant: At Times I Can See the Light” at the age of 20, and the third and final part of this trilogy, “And Now I Know Why: A Life of Sunshine, Storms and Rainbows” at the age of 32. I have decided to publish my three books together as “A Trilogy of Hope: My Journey Out of the Depths of Teenage Despair”, so that I can share my whole journey with you and to give you and others hope in seeing that it really is possible to go from the absolute depths of despair to leading a life in which there is love, light and joy, where I have found some meaning to my existence and all the pain I have been through seems worth it because it has led me to where I am today. I feel honoured to be sharing my story with you and I hope that my words can be of some comfort to you and bring you hope for a happier future. Things will get better. You are going to be okay. I am thinking of you. With love, Celia.

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© 2014 Celia Perryman. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  06/12/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-1052-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-1051-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908570

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Table of Contents

Foreword

"I’ve Got Something to Say: Alone and Screaming

in the Darkness—my story at age 16"

Celia Perryman © 1995

Introduction

What Are Friends? And Who Are My Friends?

Love/Hatred

The Rabbit

Depression and How I’ve Tried to Fight It

The Eternal Option of Suicide

What about the People?

What about the Animals?

What about the World?

The Van

Conclusion

"Maybe We Are All Relevant: At Times I Can

See the Light—my story at age 20"

Celia Perryman © 1999

Introduction

The Institution of Irrelevance And What It All Means

Something That Is Unquestionably Relevant

Friends And Love and What I’ve Since Learnt

When the Depression Wins Over Again

Suicide Always the Eternal Option

What about the People?

What about the Animals?

What about the World?

What Next?

Conclusion

"And Now I Know Why: A Life of Sunshine,

Storms and Rainbows—my story at age 32"

Celia Perryman © 2011

Introduction

Living a Life with Friends and Love

Don’t Allow Either of These to Destroy You

Life after Death and Its Influence on My Life

Depression Is Ever Tempting Because It Is Addictive—And Yes It Can Lead To Suicide

How to Subdue the Addict within You

What about the People?

What about the Animals?

What about the World?

Do All the Good You Can

So This Is How I Live My Life

Conclusion

~ comprising of the following 3 works ~

I’ve Got Something to Say: Alone and Screaming in the Darkness—my story at age 16

Celia Perryman © 1995

Maybe We Are All Relevant: At Times I Can See the Light—my story at age 20

Celia Perryman © 1999

And Now I Know Why: A Life of Sunshine, Storms and Rainbows—my story at age 32

Celia Perryman © 2011

www.CeliaPerryman15.wix.com/ATrilogyofHope

www.CeliaPerryman.blogspot.com

www.YouTube.com/user/CeliaPerryman

www.Facebook.com/Celia.Perryman1

www.Facebook.com/CeliaPerryman.ATrilogyofHope

www.Twitter.com/CeliaPerryman

Foreword

To the reader:

Following on from a childhood where I was loved at home, but didn’t fit in at school and never really felt like I belonged anywhere, I became depressed and suicidal at age 12 and spent much of my teenage years medicated and in therapy, questioning the point of my existence and wondering whether the world would be better off without me.

I wrote my first book, I’ve Got Something to Say: Alone and Screaming in the Darkness at the age of 16 because, although I didn’t exactly have any answers, I wanted to reach out to others so they wouldn’t feel so alone. I decided there and then, that if I ever did find any answers then I would write more books. And that is what I have done. I wrote my second book, Maybe We Are All Relevant: At Times I Can See the Light at the age of 20, and the third and final part of this trilogy, And Now I Know Why: A Life of Sunshine, Storms and Rainbows at the age of 32.

I have decided to publish my three books together as A Trilogy of Hope: My Journey Out of the Depths of Teenage Despair, so that I can share my whole journey with you and to give you and others hope in seeing that it really is possible to go from the absolute depths of despair to leading a life in which there is love, light and joy, where I have found some meaning to my existence and all the pain I have been through seems worth it because it has led me to where I am today.

I feel honoured to be sharing my story with you and I hope that my words can be of some comfort to you and bring you hope for a happier future. Things will get better. You are going to be okay. I am thinking of you.

With love,

Celia.

A note for concerned parents:

This book is sub-titled My Journey Out of the Depths of Teenage Despair; the first part is sub-titled Alone and Screaming in the Darkness. When I wrote the first part at age 16, I was emotionally in a place of dark despair. It is important to me to include the unhappy parts of my story; I could not credibly explain how this emotional journey has been possible for me without first proving what a dark headspace I was in as a teenager. At the time I wrote I’ve Got Something to Say: Alone and Screaming in the Darkness, I gave copies to several friends who were also struggling with depression and related issues such as self-harm and eating disorders. Despite how bleak some parts of the book may come across, the overwhelming response I received from those kids was that my book gave them hope. I remain friends with all of them and they continue to believe that my words could help others, even though some of them have yet to read the following parts of the trilogy.

Teenagers who are battling with depression may seek out others who are going through the same thing; back in the ’90s I did this mostly through finding pen friends to write letters to, whereas these days the internet is more common. Although it may seem a positive thing to be connecting with others who feel the same, these kids are actually drowning together in a sea of misery and though they may be supporting each other through hard times they are not actually helping each other get better. Choosing and making a commitment to recovery may even feel like abandoning other friends who are still drowning. A Trilogy of Hope: My Journey Out of the Depths of Teenage Despair fills a role which I believe is desperately needed: as a teenager reaching out to others across the generations, I am able to respect and sympathise with them and understand what they are going through and at the same time offer them support and guidance on their own journeys out of the darkness.

I wish you and your family all the best.

With love,

Celia.

I’ve Got Something to Say: Alone and Screaming in the Darkness—my story at age 16

Celia Perryman © 1995

For those who weren’t afraid to say they loved me …

For those who weren’t afraid to hug me …

And for all those strangers who’ve smiled at me in the street …

"Growing up is a trap. When they tell you to shut up, they

mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean

stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there,

predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat. If [you] are

immature, it means [you’re] still growing; if [you’re] still

growing, it means [you’re] still alive. Alive in a dying culture."

(from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins)

"Should I teach [my children] not to know how

to live in the world we live in now?"

Shannon Hoon (from New Life by Blind Melon)

Babies hold the answers but they can’t communicate them to us. As they learn to communicate, they learn to forget, so that they can focus on the answers required to fit into this world. (People with disorders such as Down’s syndrome and Autism only learn to communicate with us to the extent that they can learn to forget. I believe this is why some autistic people demonstrate profound capacities or abilities far in excess of what would be considered normal e.g. in the areas of mathematics, art, music, etc.) All children search for answers once they can communicate, because they have to make up for what they have lost and forgotten, as they have got used to their new environment, our world. And what they are taught is how to fit into the society that we live in. I can’t accept these answers because I know in myself that there’s so much more. That is what this book is about.

Why?

Why do I love?

Why do I give?

Why do I care so much? about you.

Because all of the loneliness,

All of the sadness,

All the confusion and grief

that I have ever felt,

I don’t want you to go through that.

And if you are going through that,

I don’t want you to feel so alone.

I wish my love could protect you.

Keep you safe from harm, and prevent your pain, and make you smile again.

I can’t save the world.

I can’t give this love to myself.

But yet sometimes I wonder if I have made a small difference to you.

I wonder if I have helped you in any way.

I really hope so.

Because then I would know

that all of the loneliness,

All of the sadness,

All the confusion and grief

that I have ever felt has been worth it, so I can be here for you.

Celia Perryman

"I’ve Got Something to Say: Alone and Screaming in the Darkness—my story at age 16"

Introduction

She scratches a letter into a wall made of stone. Maybe someday another child won’t feel as alone as she does. (from Why Go by Pearl Jam)

My name is Celia Perryman, I am 16 years old, and I live in Surrey, England, with my Mum, Dad and 14-year-old brother. I am currently at Sixth Form College, studying for A-Levels in Performing Arts, Philosophy and French. I am not a happy person.

I am writing this for several reasons, some that I cannot even identify myself. And that is the point. We all have to accept that we do not know everything, we do not have the right to control everything, and we cannot control everything. We have little control over anything, and no-one knows why we are here. People need to respect this and they obviously don’t. I am writing this to put my perspective across.

I am also writing it to help individual people. I hope this book will contain messages that can help everybody. Please read it with an open mind. The world is in a mess and we all need to listen to each other, in order to recognise what is causing the problems and what we could do to help. There are many people out there who are crying out for an answer. There are lots of perfectly happy ones too; my opinion is that they are the disillusioned ones.

I feel a tremendous amount of anger and guilt about the situation the world is in today. There are people who feel that the answer is to murder others. They feel that this is a suitable way to direct the evil and anger that society in general has forced upon him. Others attempt to wipe out entire nations, usually concerning disagreements over politics or religion. I admit I am often ignorant of the facts; precisely what problems can be solved be a war, I don’t know. But this is what leads to the simplicity and clarity of my viewpoint, which is that our most important duty in this world is to preserve life. It is the only thing we have and it is the only thing that we can never thoroughly understand. Life is sacred. Animals do not have the same level of intelligence as humans which would enable them to make such moral decisions. Some of them, unlike humans, need to eat meat to survive. But their natural and innate respect for each other could teach humans a lot.

I know I am defiant and opinionated. I may sound as though I am clear on what I feel but in fact I am confused. I don’t have any answers; I just have endless faith in the idea of love and respect for each other. I have strong feelings. I am bitter due to the way I feel: I am suspicious of the ways in which people can abuse me; I am desperately paranoid and insecure about people not liking me. I have a constant longing for love but I am instantly suspicious of anyone who tries to give it to me.

I have suffered from the supposed illness of clinical depression. I’ve been on pills and I’ve seen doctors, but nothing has helped me. The problem is deeper than that. I had no faith in the idea, and felt it would have been degrading to the depth of my feelings, had the pills been of any help. I still go through stages of suicidal feelings which are uncontrollable. I cannot control how intense they are, when they come and go, or how long they last. People can help. But for me, that has always been people I already know, as opposed to professional help. I need to feel loved and valued, that others appreciate and need me, and that there is therefore some purpose to my existence. Therapy has failed to produce these feelings of security. It is hard to develop feelings of self-worth through talking to some-one who is getting paid to fix me. However, I feel an indescribable amount of joy when a stranger smiles at me in the street. Although that is a help to me, it is the extent to which a stranger can help. The people I know haven’t been able to help me, although some, especially my family, have tried. The reason they haven’t been able to help is because they don’t understand me. And sometimes when I do feel that people understand me, it scares me, so I refuse to let them get close to me, to avoid getting hurt.

I will write about the things that have affected me most and the difficulties I have had in fitting in with other people. I now realise that the only answer to this is to continue searching for genuine people who have some understanding of me and don’t intimidate me. I am eternally grateful to those I have found.

I will tell you about my pet rabbit and how my life fell to pieces when I lost her. Although she was my main means of emotional support throughout the two years of her short life, she only really started influencing me after she died. I began to idolise her and made her out to be more important than she actually was. And people let me do this. Not that there was anything they could have done to prevent it, it’s just the way things turned out. The more people ridiculed my grief, the more defiant I became over the rabbit’s importance. Since I happened to go to a particularly bitchy boarding school at the time, I used the rabbit as a form of escapism. I wrote letters to her constantly, in lessons, during lunch break, during prep, after supper. In the dormitory, I would just sit and stare at her photo and cry for hours on end and all through the night. That’s when the depression started. I was 12 years old. And it’s lasted years. At least the first two years of my depression were centred on the rabbit and since then it has become more general. But I still feel a tremendous amount of love for that animal and I always will, because she helped me through a very difficult time in my life.

The final thing that I am going to write about may strike you as being even less important than a pet rabbit dying. But it’s where all my faith in happiness and the future lies, as well as being the one thing that rescued me from the depths of depression, and has stopped me from choosing to end my life on several occasions. On the face of things, it’s a plan to buy a camper van and travel the world. But what it signifies to me is much more than that. Travelling is something I am drawn to, and it is the only thing that I have ever been really passionate about in my whole life. It is something I feel compelled to do and it is something I will do. I will never be truly satisfied with anything throughout my life, if I don’t do this first. I want to see new places, and meet different kinds of people, and experience the true beauty of the world. I want to live a simple life over which I have complete control and to be able to appreciate in some ways how the world was before the people ruined it. Right now it’s what gives my life purpose. I will cling onto it in every way that I can because my life has never had such an amount of purpose before.

I hope that you will appreciate this book. I’m not sure about enjoyment as that is not the reason I am writing it. Sometimes people enjoy hearing about the suffering of others so if that’s the kind of person you are then maybe you will enjoy those bits. I hope not, as that would signify that you are not at all genuinely happy within yourself. Through this writing, I am opening my heart and soul to you. I hope that this book is of some use in improving your life, or giving you an improved perspective of reality. Maybe it will help you to help somebody else. I hope that in the future you can bring joy and happiness to the lives of many. If I can inspire people to spread a little joy, and do what they can to make the world a better place, then that would mean everything to me.

Finally, I’d like to thank you for reading this and I’d like to thank everybody I know. Whether you like me, hate me, don’t understand me, or whether I’ve read your signals wrongly, you’ve helped me to understand myself a bit more and to become a stronger person. Try to feel a little empathy with everyone you meet, we are all humans. Love one another, and take care. And to all those strangers who’ve smiled at me in the street. Cheers.

What Are Friends? And Who Are My Friends?

Love/Hatred

My relationships with other people have caused me much confusion and misery over the years. It is human nature to strive for love and happiness, but most people are disillusioned in their search. They are all out to please themselves and save themselves. Life is a battlefield and the weak get trampled to the ground. The winners may feel they have won, but I don’t believe they are truly happy. I think they are repressed—out of touch with their own true emotions.

Human beings did not invent the concepts of love and happiness. These are things which are greater than we are. Yet people are so disrespectful of love. When I feel love, and a desperate longing to be part of it, it means everything to me, yet is beyond my comprehension. Love is infinite. It is impossible to ignore.

There’s another problem for me though. I believe in the power of love, happiness and friendship as I feel completely overwhelmed by these things. But other people don’t seem to feel the same thing. I have a desperate need for constant emotional support. But whenever I start to get close to somebody they get suspicious of me and feel uneasy because they don’t like it. I feel like I am the only person who craves being close to others. Most people are completely self-centred. The idea of really knowing other people and of really being known terrifies them. Not only will they not open up to me, but if I try to open up to them—I get signals that they want me to stop. And talk about something else. Or talk to somebody else.

My problem is that I need to talk, and put everything I feel into words, because I want to share myself with others so I don’t feel so alone. If something cannot be put into words then it cannot possibly be understood. And concepts such as love cannot be put into words. I’m writing this down because I need to explain it, even though no-one I know wants to hear it. Also, if there is anybody else who feels the same way, I know that it will be a desperate relief to you to know that you’re not alone. Personally, I feel alone. I feel as though I have no friends. I know that I do have friends; my friends just don’t understand me in the way I desperately need them to. And they don’t want to.

I’ve always had problems identifying who my real friends are. Most people claim that they can’t remember their first years of school. Those that can probably didn’t think about things as deeply as I did at the time. I used to spend hours wondering around the playground alone, trying to figure out why it was that I didn’t fit in, and how it was that I was different. I was five years old.

I did have one friend. But even in those first years of school I was scared of going up to people and speaking to them. It was because I didn’t want to be a hassle to them. I felt as though, just by my presence, I could ruin their lives a bit, and have a negative effect on them. It’s the way I still feel.

When people see children playing, talking, shouting, and fighting, they assume that they are looking at these kids through the eyes of an adult. Even kids of my age and younger do it. But there’s no such thing. Some people may say that’s not something I have a right to say, that I’m still a child and when I’m a little older I’ll understand things better. They are wrong. I always assumed that there would be a certain age that one would suddenly grow up, become a grown-up, and automatically lose all empathy for children. In actual fact, growing up is something that happens slowly, and forgetting certain things about childhood happens